Freud - The Lonely Woman

She is a 67-year-old divorced woman. Her ex-husband passed away years ago. She had three children, one passed away at 34, the others don't want to have anything to do with her. Her mother recently passed away. They never had a good relationship, she was basically raised by her grandmother. She is extremely lonely and suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome. She constantly associates love with money and treats her youngest son as if he is the one that is supposed to handle all of her unhappiness even though he lives 4000 miles away and has a family of his own. She is a helpless soul and is still searching to find herself. She is manipulative, conniving, stubborn and unhappy. She constantly is switching from one mood to the next. Blaming her environment for all her unhappiness and then trying to act like she is happy. This makes her seem selfish and narcissistic. She has anxiety and claims she feels as if she's walking on pins and needles.

Freud might call this women neurotic, she "maintains the relationship to an external reality while in psychosis that relationship breaks down all together" (391). She seems to be in a constant battle with her inner self. The people she loves seem to keep abandoning her and she has never had any type of role model in her life which is causing her to live in a state of neurosis. So according to Freud the introjection which she has received all of her life, which has been nothing but negative, has caused her to project that on to her environment. "Introjection and projection are terms used to describe how the self shapes itself by adapting models from outside itself and externalizes its own feelings by assigning them to others" (391).

"Introduction: Strangers to Ourselves: Psychoanalysis. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan. Oxford, 2004 p. 391